The Bond of Power

Download this post as PDF >

When first meeting Joseph Chilton Pearce I passionately described, “bonding is not simply a warm feeling. It is an immediate, spontaneous transfer of information and meaning, moment by moment, that flows through the senses, and more importantly, telepathically, from inside out.” Joe paused and said, “I have been describing this for thirty-years and this is the closest anyone has come.” And with that, our twenty-year friendship and fond mentoring relationship began.

We have all seen a young parent behind, pushing a hooded baby stroller, ear buds in place, phone in hand, talking away. What sensory and telepathic shared meaning is being exchanged during these most explosive and precious moments and months of a child’s life? As Pearce describes, “Bonding is the issue, regardless of age. Of our limitless innate capacities, only those given a model environment will open and develop.” And we blame the child?

In my conversations spanning five years with Samdhong Rinpoche, one of the Dalai Lama’s closest colleagues, he shared:

“When enlightened teachers use words, it is because of the limitations of the listener, not the speaker. Buddha, from the achievement of Buddhahood until his death, did not speak a single word. In the Mahaparinirvana Sutra it is said that he was absolutely silent. Words are the tools or instrument of unenlightened people. Enlightened people do not need words. Apart from that, in Tibet many mature disciples and enlightened teachers teach and receive many things without physically meeting. They live hundreds of miles apart and still communicate.”

If not words, then how is ‘meaning’ shared? In Magical Child, Pearce describes poor African mothers waiting to see a Western Doctor, holding naked infants for hours. The doctor asked, “how is it that you are not soiled holding your naked baby for so long?” The mother shook her head, confused, then replied, “how do you know when you need to pee?”

From my conversation with Jean Liedloff, author of The Continuum Concept, describing life with a prehistoric village deep in the Amazon:

I was living in the village, on and off, for about three years, looking straight at these natives, and not seeing what I was looking at, because I was so blinded by ‘our view’ that I didn’t even notice, amazingly enough, children never argued. They played together unsupervised all day, tiny children from crawling, one year, up until the age they could still be called children, 10, 12, and 14. Not only did they didn’t fight, but they never even argued. This is not what we have been taught as human nature, or boys will be boys. So, I said well, boys won’t be boys. Somebody’s got something very wrong here.

They’re exactly the same species as we are, except they are behaving the way we all evolved to behave. We are completely crazed being mistreated as infants and children, treated inappropriately for our species. As a result of what we have done to ourselves, and I’m putting it strongly because this is so bad, we have actually created an antisocial population. Not by accident. Nobody’s born rotten. You don’t have just bad kids. It’s not true. There is no such thing. But you can make them. And ironically, the reason you make children bad or antisocial, is by not treating this profoundly social animal socially.

It is perfectly clear and unanimous, all the millions or billions of babies who are crying at this very moment are screaming because they want to be next to a live body. Do you really think they’re all wrong? They couldn’t possibly be all wrong. This is the voice of nature. This is the voice of not being intellectually interfered with. The baby knows what it’s supposed to have, and the minute you put it down, it cries. It’s letting you know. It’s signaling you perfectly clearly, don’t put me down, don’t put me down. And we have built into us equally, without a dictionary or book, the knowledge of what it means when the baby goes waa, waa, waa. We know it means pick me up. Don’t put me down. Don’t leave me, don’t leave me.

In the village children, and quite small like 3, 4, and 5-year old’s carry babies around all day. No one is saying sit here. You can only hold he baby while you’re sitting down, or watch out. They trust very small children because five minutes ago they were babies themselves. They just know how to take care of babies. And here we are, great big grown-up louts in our twenties or thirties reading books about how to take care of babies. I mentioned to a reporter for the New York Times that I would be embarrassed to admit to natives that where I come from women don’t know how to take care of their children until they read instructions written in a book by a man they have never even met. I would never tell them that because I would lose any respect I might have, forever. If you were there, you wouldn’t either. You’d see how inappropriate it would be to admit that we are that badly far off. In the village, every child, every man, every woman knows how to take care of babies.

But not our parents pushing the stroller. “Bonding is the issue, regardless of age.” In The Bond of Power, Joe lifts bonding and attachment out of sweet sentiment by describing the shared meaning our relationships offer, lifelong, if we are listening, attuned. He spent the last decades of his life exploring what he called, The Intelligence of the Heart, a constant broadcast of information and meaning that informs every cell of our body how we are doing. A frequency that can be measured fifteen to twenty feet, and subtlety, as entangled quantum fields, infinitely. Bonding is attunement to this field and translating its meaning into insight.

mm

Joseph Chilton Pearce describing writing The Bond of Power

The Bond of Power was my bond with Muktananda and Siddha Yoga, which represented the classic Eastern tradition or worldview, and David Bohm, Einstein’s protégé, one of the most influential physicists of the twenty-century, representing the Western worldview. I wrote the book in Muktananda’s Ashram in India, where I spent time for twelve years. Meanwhile back in 1958 I came across David Bohm’s writing called “Causality & Chance in Modern Physics” and it blew me out orbit. It was Bohm’s first great work. Bohm was heading towards the Nobel Prize in Physics had he not gotten in trouble with the McCarthy business. He refused to sign the Loyalty Oath that was sweeping the country. No, he said, this is an affront, not only to me and Physics but to the whole academic world. They took away his citizenship and forced him out of the country. It was an unbelievable and terrible injustice. He landed in Brazil and later in London, at Birkbeck College, where he and I met several times.

Of our limitless innate capacities, only those given a model environment will open and develop. Bonding is the issue, regardless of age. I considered Muktananda and Bohm each a different matrix or model, representing completely different world views. As a child is empowered by bonding with his or her parents, we are empowered through our bonds or relationships with individuals who have developed in themselves powerful ways of perceiving and being in the world. Both Bohm and Muktananda were expressing different metaphors to describe these forces, one Eastern and the other Western. The Bond of Power explores this.

In fact, the things that went on in India are just what you read about and they were all true and they all happened to me or for me. I felt it a great grace and privilege to be able to experience those things. But the event which led to Muktananda was as wild as any of the rest of them. I was in that little place of mine up there in the Blue Ridge, two miles from the nearest paved road and completely cut off from the world. The woman who was helping me run the Magical Child workshops came in and said, “you’ve got to go to Oakland.” And I asked, “what for?” She said to meet this incredible guy that I met. This tremendous thing happened in his brain. He’s a Guru from India. A friend of mine and I had formed the Guru of the Month’s Club in utter disgust over the parade of Gurus coming over to this country. I had utter contempt for them. I got so furious at her, the idea that we’d drive up to Oakland to meet one of those, that she had actually gotten sucked in by one of the shysters disgusted me and I refused to do it. And yet another person who had read my first book found out and he sent through my publisher because I didn’t have an address for anybody except my publisher and my immediate family, sent through my publisher a copy of Muktananda’s book, “Play of Consciousness,” and I opened it up to look at it and here was I thought a picture of a doped-out rock star. He had a crazy look to him, and on the cover, it said “Play of Consciousness” and I thought my God, I don’t have time to read that now. I’ll look at that tonight. That night I turned on my little Aladdin kerosene lamp and sat to read. I said well I’ll just have to see what this shyster is saying before I throw the book away. And I opened it up and I read about two sentences of the first page, introduction of the book, about the first two sentences of the opening chapter and here it came, this huge weight pressing me down. I was gone.

And I fell through this great blackness in this incredible space and when I came to I thought, with this blinding white light in my eyes. We were two miles to the nearest road. How could anybody be shining a bright light through that window of ours? I looked again and the bright light was coming from a white marble alabaster statue of Jesus. Here was this white alabaster image of Jesus right in front of me and all this light was pouring from that, brilliant light. And I looked more closely and the eyes of the statue were brilliantly alive and locked onto my eyes. Then the statue leaned over and blew up my nostrils and I went out again except this time into a far more rapturous and ecstatic out of body experience.

Finally, I came back and was sitting on my coach up in the mountains with the lantern going and this book on my lap and when I came back I put the book aside and I said to Karen, “wherever this guy is I’m going.” I started reading further into the book the next day and I found out one of the ways Muktananda gives Shaktipat (the passage of power from the one who has received, to the initiate) the passage of power from the one whose received themselves to the initiate) is by breathing up their nostrils. And that cemented it. I mean what more do you need? Shaktipāta, a transmission of spiritual energy. In Sanskrit, śakti means “energy” or “power,” and pāta means “to fall” or “descend.” Shaktipāta refers to the descent of spiritual energy, often from a guru or divine source, into the seeker.

Well I met Muktananda. They ushered me in, I sat down and his interpreter started talking to me and the first thing I did was I looked straight at Babba and I got embarrassed, but I went ahead and I blurted it out, “I think you’re Jesus.” He laughed and laughed and slapped his knee and just roared. And then he stopped and looked me straight in the eye and pointed and he said, “But of course, and so are you.” So, we got off to a good start.

Muktananda then spent the next couple of hours telling me about the heart. He described every facet of the heart. “At the center of a heart is the point from which the whole universe arises, comes out in a great swirl of an energy we call Shakti, the creative energy of the world” and Shakti dance around the center of the heart, the center which we call Sheva, the primal God in the heart, and Shakti is his counterpart that dances the world around him, creating the universe for him to witness.

And therein you have the whole picture of creation, where it comes from, out of the heart, and he went on. It took him about two hours. He very carefully explained everything about the heart. That led to the writing of the book Bond of Power, and my next book, Evolution’s End. And from that point on everything in my life has centered on what I began to describe as the intelligence of the heart.

Introduction: The Bond of Power

In some off-guard moment, a thought which illuminates new territory can explode in our heads and change the shape of our thinking and our lives. This “postulate which arrives full-blown in the brain” is a function of mind which holds the key to our nature, development, and fulfillment.

This phenomenon is rare. It comes as creative inspiration, scientific discovery, the Eureka!, the mystical revelation, the conversion experience. Its source has been a matter of debate. Trace the function to its source, and the mystery of our brain, mind, creation, and creator unfolds. The postulate is like a thread which, pulled from the woof and warp of our reality, unweaves that fabric and leaves us the threads from which reality itself is woven.

The problem with tracing the roots of creative insight is that thought, no matter its strength or brilliance, is not sufficient for the task. The postulate-revelation doesn’t arrive in the brain as thought, but as the materials for thought. Thought is but a tool of the function and seems only peripherally (though vitally) involved.

Revelation is as valid a term as postulate, since new information seems revealed to our mind, rather than thought by it. The postulate seems to arise from some deep recess of mind, not brain. I will use the term insight hereafter, since it is a “seeing” from within, even when projected without.

Insight seems extra-cerebral, an intrusion into our awareness. It flashes into us always in some moment out of mind, never when we are busy thinking about the subject involved… Insight seems a grace, that which is given freely rather than made by our effort. Einstein spoke of his insights arriving like flashes of lightning which, though they lit up the landscape of his mind for only an instant, forever after changed its shape. The only thing which can change the nature of our thought is an energy more powerful than that thought. There are different modes of mental experience and the difference lies in the levels of energy involved. Ordinary thinking, our everyday “roof-brain chatter,” is a weak-energy emergent of our brain, while insight is surely more powerful. That is why the insight function isn’t reversible, to be repeated by formula. Our ordinary thinking can (must) prepare for insight, respond to it, but can’t manufacture it. A weak thought can’t produce a stronger one, but it can attract it. Nothing that we can do will insure the arrival of insight, yet insight comes to us only when we are passionately involved, and have thoroughly prepared for its coming.

In his mature years, Mozart’s mechanical excellence was so perfected that his genius could speak as direct insight. He would receive a commission for a new symphony and the work was quite likely to fall into his head as a gestalt, arrive full-blown in his brain, twenty minutes of music in an instant out of time. He then had the arduous task of translating that moment out of mind into the myriad of notes which could, in turn, be translated by others to make the symphony sound in the actual world. A pianist friend of mine was preparing to play his favorite Mozart sonata in concert one evening. He leaned back to immerse himself in the nature of that work, and experienced the entire sonata as a single “round volume of sound.” Every note, phrase, and nuance was there, perfect and complete in that instant out of time. The experience was numinous, of a religious, mystical tinge, and had a profound effect on my friend. He had, perhaps, shared the sonata’s original nature as insight-revelation. The task of translating insight often proves as great as the work necessary to bring it about. Hamilton spent fifteen years on the quaternions after his insight. The famous Belgian chemist August Kekulé’s translation bridging the symbolism of a ring of snakes to the hard data of chemistry was not simple, nor was Einstein’s final neat equation spelled out in that original lightning bolt.

End

PS: Joe often used the metaphor of lightning to describe how insight flashes, changing the human brain forever.